


memory disorder

by ursahelianthus



Category: Timeless (TV 2016)
Genre: Found Family, Gen, facial recognition, garcy if you squint, learning and memory, polaroid pictures
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-17
Updated: 2018-11-17
Packaged: 2019-08-24 17:24:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,249
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16644563
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ursahelianthus/pseuds/ursahelianthus
Summary: It occurs to Lucy that the only things worth taking pictures of in this bunker are the people. She’d gladly forget the rest.





	memory disorder

After the JFK fiasco, Lucy decides with the maturity of a twelve-year-old and the justifications of a thirty-something to simply avoid Jessica. It’s not hiding, she tells herself. More like exercising her right to forestall further personal suffering. There’s no rule that says you have to interact with the resurrected wife of your friend/teammate/one-night-stand. 

The fever has faded but Lucy’s still not exactly firing on all cylinders, so she gives herself a break from the historical research and puts on her anthropologist hat to have a proper look around the bunker. Despite being her current place of imprisonment, it’s actually kind of fascinating for how well it’s been preserved, like the previous tenants vacated the premises in a hurry and had to leave all their belongings behind. There are whole rooms full of artifacts that she hasn’t gotten a chance to explore and examine. She’d never even seen the inside of that closet John was in, which apparently also had an escape route none of them knew about?? Well, Flynn might have known, but he was in 1934. Would have saved them a lot of trouble.

Lucy is poking around a storage closet when she happens on an old Polaroid camera, the black casing dusty and chipped, still loaded with a few sheets of film. The urge to snap a photo of anything just to watch the picture appear is almost irresistible, but there are only five exposures left and she doesn’t want to waste them. 

It occurs to her that the only things worth taking pictures of in this bunker are the people. She’d gladly forget the rest. Then she remembers Denise’s flash drive with her wife and children on it, and it finally clicks that Lucy could forget everyone too if she were left behind again. 

Her stomach drops, the dread a cold weight in her chest that feels like the beginnings of a panic attack. Is this what Denise and Jiya and Connor go through every time? How on earth does Jiya let Rufus get in that machine? How do they even deal, knowing that every trip their memories will be reset again? Lucy’s pissed that she remembers JFK’s assassination as happening in Austin, not Dallas, but not remembering any one of these people she’s come to consider family would be infinitely worse. 

Okay then. Seven people besides her in the bunker, five Polaroids. She doesn’t need a picture of Jessica, so that’s six. And Lucy really doesn’t want to ask Wyatt for a photo now, so that’s five. Instead she goes and prints one of Wyatt off her phone. 

She chooses a picture of him in 1931, speeding up the highway in that fantastic blue convertible they borrowed from Paramount Studios. He’s grinning a loose, lopsided grin, practically twinkling at her, still a little high off the sex and the glamor of Old Hollywood. Even now Lucy can still call up the rush she felt sitting in that car. The sun and the wind and the open road so liberating after weeks in their claustrophobic bunker, the deep satisfaction of another successful mission, the thrill of new possibilities. The last few hours that they were happy. 

Once Lucy’s looking at his picture though, it takes forever to decide what to write on the back. She stares and stares, trying to pare all the complications down to Vital Wyatt Facts in Case of Memory Erasure. What should she know about him if he came back one day a stranger? Finally she writes _Master Sergeant Wyatt Logan, Delta Force. Loves Jessica._ After another minute she adds _Reckless hothead. Sweetheart. Brave, competent, quick-thinking soldier. Speaks German, believes in free will, and has no problem killing bad people to keep them from hurting good ones. You’re friends. You save each other’s lives._

Lucy realizes she’s hunched over the table, shoulders up near her ears, pen held so tightly her entire arm is stiff. She pushes back and rolls her shoulders and neck to relieve some of the tension. What’s written doesn’t seem like nearly enough, but she leaves it for now and goes to find her first Polaroid subject. 

 

Rufus is lying on his back welding something to the Lifeboat, his long legs sticking out from underneath the metal hull. Lucy tugs on the bottom of his jeans.

“Lucy? What’s up?”

She holds up the camera and Rufus breaks into a smile. The novelty of watching a photo appear on a little square of paper never does wear off, apparently even for genius engineers who build time machines. 

“Picture of you with the Lifeboat?”

“Yeah! Hang on.” He scrambles around to the front of the Lifeboat and slaps one of the giant spinning rings with his right hand, gesturing to the Lifeboat with his left. “This bad boy can fit so many time travelers in it.”

Lucy giggles and snaps his photo. He runs over to watch it develop, and Lucy looks up at him for a moment, glad to see the simple happiness in his boyish smile.

“Hey, so does this mean you have the fourth seat installed?” 

“Ugh, no, I’m stuck on the time dilation equations. By mass, right now we could send an extra half-person. A child, maybe. A dog?” 

Lucy flaps the film paper absently. “Ooh, great idea. Let’s get a puppy.”

“And keep it cooped up in here with us?”

“Maybe if we get one Agent Christopher will have to let us out to take it on walks. She can chip the dog and us if it makes her feel better,” Lucy says, half-serious. Allowing herself this harmless wish. “She can knit it tiny sweaters!”

Rufus laughs. “A Time Team mascot, huh? I could get behind that. I always wanted a golden retriever, but we were too…poor, basically. Never got around to it even after I started working for Connor.” He shrugs good-naturedly, and Lucy understands. Anything before these missions seems like a past life entirely. 

“When we were kids, Amy wanted to get a puppy and name it Percy short for Persimmon. Mom never let us, but she did buy us a crate of persimmons every fall after that. Seemed like a good compromise at the time.” Lucy smiles wryly as her hand automatically goes to her locket, the camera bumping against the gold chain. 

She looks down and sees that Rufus’ picture has fully emerged. He grins at her, pleased with how his official portrait has turned out, and goes back to work on that elusive fourth seat.

_Rufus Carlin, PhD. Physicist, senior engineer, and pilot extraordinaire. Loves Jiya, his mom and brother, and Star Wars. Your goofiest, most stalwart teammate and steadiest friend since this whole mess began. Sticks to his moral compass, loyal to a fault, and uses jokes of wildly varying quality as coping mechanisms. Bring him Chocodiles and he’ll fill you in on the rest._

 

Lucy takes a picture of Connor on a random Tuesday afternoon in March. He doesn’t question it, just raises his tumbler of whiskey and poses like it’s a red-carpet photoshoot.

_Connor Mason. Loves Rufus, whiskey, and getting his picture taken. Ex-billionaire tech mogul and somewhat shortsighted inventor of the Rittenhouse-funded time machine. Can’t cook to save his life, but will recite entire Shakespeare plays minus whichever part you pick as someone else prepares dinner for you both. Recently discovered heart of gold has grown three sizes since you first met._

 

A few days after the suffragette mission, Lucy takes Denise’s photo at the control console. Denise stands there in her no-nonsense black work clothes, arms crossed and gun holstered at her hip, smiling a fond, motherly smile. She had understood, with heartbreaking sympathy, that Lucy wanted to keep pictures of her family in the Lifeboat too. 

_Agent Denise Christopher, Department of Homeland Security. Loves her wife and kids most of all but has a soft spot for you bunker inhabitants. Softer by the day, but it doesn’t keep her from being very, very good at her job. Recruited the team, went rogue and let you steal the Lifeboat, arrested 223 Rittenhouse members, tailed you to arrest Flynn, then helped break him out of prison. Closest thing to a mother you have. Keeps you all as safe as she can._

 

Jiya is Polaroid-immortalized in her Cagney outfit, still giddy and relieved and flushed with pride after returning from her first official mission. 

_Jiya Marri, PhD. Exceedingly clever and unfailingly kind. Offered to find out why Amy disappeared before you were even friends. Figured out how to pull in the Lifeboat from 1593 just using the words “death” and “millennium” from Rufus’ note. Loves Rufus – everyone was glad when that finally happened. Has visions of futures in the past, is troubled by them, but they don’t keep her from making popcorn and watching Real Housewives with you._

Four down, one to go. 

 

Later that evening Flynn is sprawled on the couch in his nightclothes, flipping casually through a monograph on the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. His head is bowed over the slim volume and his dark hair falls forward, uncharacteristically messy, uncombed and still a little damp after showering. 

Lucy’s basically just watching it dry from her perch at one of the kitchen tables, having given up on an honest effort to relearn the altered events of the Reagan shooting. 'Just watching' isn’t quite right though. She’s observing, absorbing, cataloguing. She traces over Flynn again and again with her eyes, trying to capture the set of his shoulders, the way he takes up space, the subtle color shifts in his hair as it dries. There’s so much data to be had.

Back in college, as an aspiring historian, Lucy had learned everything she could about how information is processed, stored, and retrieved by the human brain. She’d taken psychology and neurobiology courses, had found individual memory just as riveting as collective memory and institutional memory, just as valuable in explaining the course of history. Now, as an unlikely defender of all three, she finds herself circling back to old questions of how and why humans remember and forget. She finds herself hungry, ravenous even, for knowledge she might be able to keep safe in her own mind. Ever since she started this photography project, she’s tried to be deliberately mindful of the present, to be more attentive to the details of her reality and the people she loves. She has an irrational conviction that if she memorizes these people, really puts in the work to commit every nuance to memory and hard code them in her brain, that there’s a chance the universe won’t be able to take them from her. 

There was a paper that she read for a seminar more than a decade ago now, about facial recognition and the plasticity of neural circuits. The particulars are fuzzy, but she recalls how researchers proved that-

“Lucy.” Flynn drawls her name without turning around. “Want to tell me why you’ve been staring holes in the back of my head for the last fifteen minutes?”

Oh, busted. 

Flynn sounds amused and relaxed, but Lucy’s so wound up that she just blurts, “Did you know that faces are encoded in memory by way of a specialized face perception mechanism, and that each face has a corresponding spatial activity pattern in the brain?”

Flynn looks over his shoulder worriedly, not used to hearing her panic-spout neurobiology facts. She knows she’s giving herself away by talking too fast. He has his arm over the back of the couch, a second away from standing up and coming over to make sure she’s all right. But now that she’s started, she can’t seem to stop. 

“Did you know the neurons that structurally encode a face are connected to the neurons that encode relevant semantic and episodic memories? The face is linked through multiple pathways to the person’s name, the sound of their voice, shared conversations, interactions, emotions…More familiar faces are recognized with faster and more powerful wavelength responses.” 

Flynn has abandoned his book and walks slowly over to where Lucy’s sitting, approaching gingerly like he has no idea what to do but thinks he should do something. He realizes he’s way too tall, and so he crouches beside her chair, bringing them just about eye-level but not forcing eye contact. 

Lucy looks down at her hands. “And,” she says quietly, “did you know that with repeated exposures, your memory of a person is actually physically strengthened through the development of additional neural circuits?” 

Flynn doesn’t answer any of her questions, but one of his large, warm hands comes up to cover both of hers. When she meets his gaze, she sees the same laser-focus, the same startling intensity as always. But now that she’s really paying attention, she recognizes something of starvation in his eyes too. The desperate edge of trying to take everything in before it can be taken away, the very real fear of forgetting. This whole time he’s been trying to memorize her too. 

She takes a picture of him the next morning at breakfast. He smiles at her over rations of cereal and coffee like bunker meals are the most normal, domestic things in the world. 

She doesn’t get far in her inscription before duty calls, but when she steals a moment to return to his photograph, she can’t think of anything else she needs to add. She runs her fingertips over the words she's written.

_Garcia Flynn. You can trust him._


End file.
